Thursday, May 11, 2006

airtainment; creating a culture

so what on earth am in on about, you must be wondering.

airtainment:i flew recently to Cape Town with German national aircarrier Lufthansa. ooh, good service, but they really do need to reconsider their definition of "entertainment". For one, since it was a long-haul flight (11 or so hours) which always leaves late at night (about 10:30pm, regardless of airline) it´s always weird because they serve dinner at midnight. right. no biggie. everyone eats then. swell. the food was excellent. especially the Asian Vegetarian dinner I´d ordered. i mean, it was tasty, and imaginative. well, but then they got the after-dinner movie started, at, get this, 1AM. What do we get served up but "Harry Potter". "Try to please everyone and please no-one" ring a bell here? And please, all the kids were asleep anyway. So, we adults were left with Harry Potter. I read my "El País" instead. Ooh, then at 4AM we were treated to another movie: The Mask/Legend of Zorro. It just didn´t get any better than that. And I thought to myself: would never say that this is the nation who awards the Golden Bear in cinema. Will the people who make inputs to the Golden Bear please consult with the "entertainment" folks at Lufthansa????? That way, we all win...

----Before I get to "creating a culture". On said flight, the seat configuration was such that there were four seats down the middle, and two seats on the periphery of the plane. The check-in staff had made some weird seating assignments because people (friends, families) were invariably not sitting together. I had an aisle seat on the periphery and an old-ish woman was supposed to sit next to me. But said woman approached me, saying that she wanted to sit with her friend, would I be kind enough to swap, etc. What struck me was how this woman turned on this face. Yes, it seemed artificial. Like the look a street urchin might switch to in order to hustle some money. Also, I was reminded of Cary Grant´s two ditty aunts in the movie "Arsenic and Lace". I looked at them and said: "If your friend has an aisle seat, then I´ll swap. Otherwise, no.". They both looked at me, crestfallen, as if they were two toddlers who´d just been deprived of a favourite toy. I looked at them some more; gave them a typical Madrid-look-of-insouciance (because I had a sense of being hustled), and said: "Look, it´s 11 hours of flying. I have long legs. There´s just no way that I can sit in the window seat. That´s how it is. Sorry." And they toddled over to the other side of the plane to check the seat assignment. Anyway, it transpired that the friend did have an aisle seat, so we switched. Funny thing was that I ended up seated next to a Swedish man who is Information Manager for the municipality of the town in which he lives, and who used to be a sports journalist. We had some great conversation. In the end, we all won...

----creating a culture:

One of the great things about the Anglosaxon world is cutrate bookstores. Thusfar I´ve not seen similar here in Spain. Well, for instance, here in Spain if a book is new, whether it is hard- or softcover, you pay the same price regardless. In Anglosajonia you don´t buy the hardcover (unless you really really want the book); you wait for the softcover version which usually costs at least 50% less than the hardcover. But further, in South Africa, we have a number of shops where you can buy cutprice books. Okay, you might not always get the latest bestseller, but one can really find some gems. The publishing culture seems to work different over here (in Spain) since to date I´ve not come across a cutprice bookstore. So, on my recent SA visit I got hold of a copy of Timothy Garton Ash´s book "The File" which deals with his treatment of the file he had access to the Stasi had compiled on him during the cold war era. I bought it for 1.5 USD more or less. Oooh, my English today...

It was interesting to read, in view of my recent visit to Berlin. But more from a cultural viewpoint. One of the questions he poses is "what makes someone a collaborator with the system, and what makes an opponent?" I´d always wondered about that vis-a-vis Apartheid. OKay, so he does not go on to answer that question. What´s interesting though is the extensive network of informers the Stasi had at their disposal. I remember clearly the case he refers to of a woman who, post fall of the Berlin Wall, had come to gain access to her Stasi file, only to discover that her husband had denounced her years before, for which she had spent 5 years in prison. Jolín. I don´t know how one recovers from that kind of discovery. She went home, and is still married to this guy...

Then, on the way back to Madrid, from Cape Town, but with escala in Frankfurt, we watched "Good Night, and Good Luck", the George Clooney movie. What tight direction. Steven Spielberg could learn a thing or two from Clooney in this regard, i.e. how to tell a story in fewer words, or in this case, fewer hours, minutes. Great movie. Again, we have this notion of creating a culture of collaboration (meant here in a perjorative sense), and developing a nation of informers. And more importantly, how to recover from that kind of incestuousness once the regime has fallen.I don´t know. It is something to think about...